Anyone wondering if July’s party for Internet stocks and public offerings
was nothing but a mid-summer night’s dream may want to see Internet.com’s
IPO Index, up 7% the past week and 43% since debut. As a group, these dozen
stocks trade down 48% from their highs since IPO and 38% better than the lows.
INTERNET.COM’S | Ticker | Share | Share | % change | % change |
IPO INDEX | symbol | 9/10/98 | 9/1/98 | week | from IPO |
Inktomi | INKT | $62.88 | $51.38 | 22% | 249% |
24/7 Media | TFSM | $10.50 | $9.13 | 15% | -25% |
Broadcom | BRCM | $66.50 | $59.81 | 11% | 177% |
GeoCities | GCTY | $23.75 | $21.38 | 11% | 40% |
Broadcast.com | BCST | $38.75 | $35.25 | 10% | 115% |
ISS Group | ISSX | $28.56 | $27.25 | 5% | 30% |
WavePhore | WAVO | $5.50 | $5.31 | 4% | -41% |
Netgravity | NETG | $9.44 | $9.44 | 0% | 5% |
Digital River | DRIV | $6.06 | $6.25 | -3% | -29% |
CDnow | CDNW | $8.00 | $9.00 | -11% | -50% |
Cyberian | COOL | $7.88 | $9.38 | -16% | -56% |
Exodus | EXDS | $20.88 | $26.75 | -22% | 39% |
TOTAL | 288.69 | 270.31 | |||
AVERAGE | 24.06 | 22.53 | 7% | 43% | |
| (c) 1998 Mecklermedia (NASDAQ:MECK) – Internet.com | |||||
The three leaders in gains each have what we believe a differentiating
story that gets Wall Street’s attention (hard to do especially after a
major correction).
Inktomi (NASDAQ:INKT) leads all runs from IPO price with a 249% rise.
Fueling that are the key deals it keeps making to sell its cache server,
which speeds up Net access. Latest believer, AOL, picked up the technology
for its network September 9.
Broadcom (NASDAQ:BRCM) broadband chip set has an effective lock on the
emerging fat pipe environment. Most of the cable companies and telcos doing
broadband in one flavor or another use Broadcom’s chips for set-top and
other hardware devices.
Broadcast.com (NASDAQ:BCST), while down 48% from its euphoric best IPO-ever
status achieved July 17, has been aggressive in signing content exclusives
for sports and other events to stream over the Internet. While we expect
extreme volatility with BCST as the herky-jerky audio-video over the
Internet of today, BCST through September 10 was still up from IPO price
115%.
But is an Internet IPO by any other name an Internet IPO in the same vein?
Take for example the beyond-cool results for Cyberian Outpost
(NASDAQ:COOL), with a ticker symbol and name sounding cold at this
juncture, down 56% from IPO price. E-tail stocks have taken a beating as
the fear of shopping agents and commoditization of sales may emerge and
subjugate Web store fronts.
CDnow (NASDAQ:CDNW), which played its marketing hand in last night’s MTV
video awards, is also down considerably from its IPO price, 50% off. The
battle between bots and brands is on.
On the search-shopper emerging bot-side, there’s Amazon’s (NASDAQ:AMZN)
Junglee (which it paid 1.6 million AMZN shares for August 4, valued at
$127.4 million as of September 10). Coming on the heels of that is
Inktomi’s (NASDAQ:INKT) 1.8 million share purchase of C2B, another shopping
search engine. That pending deal had a $113 million value on INKT’s close
yesterday.
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